NOTE: This module is considered legacy; modern Perl releases (5.18 and higher) are going to remove Pod-Parser from core and use Pod-Simple for all things POD.

Pod::Find provides a set of functions to locate POD files. Note that no function is exported by default to avoid pollution of your namespace, so be sure to specify them in the use statement if you need them:

use Pod::Find qw(pod_find);

From this version on the typical SCM (software configuration management) directories are ignored. These are: RCS, CVS, SCCS, .svn, .hg, .git, .sync

The function pod_find searches for POD documents in a given set of files and/or directories. It returns a hash with the file names as keys and the POD name as value. The POD name is derived from the file name and its position in the directory tree.

E.g. when searching in $HOME/perl5lib, the file $HOME/perl5lib/MyModule.pm would get the POD name MyModule, whereas $HOME/perl5lib/Myclass/Subclass.pm would be Myclass::Subclass. The name information can be used for POD translators.

Only text files containing at least one valid POD command are found.

A warning is printed if more than one POD file with the same POD name is found, e.g. CPAN.pm in different directories. This usually indicates duplicate occurrences of modules in the @INC search path.

OPTIONS The first argument for pod_find may be a hash reference with options. The rest are either directories that are searched recursively or files. The POD names of files are the plain basenames with any Perl-like extension (.pm, .pl, .pod) stripped.

Apply Perl-specific heuristics to find the correct PODs. This includes stripping Perl-like extensions, omitting subdirectories that are numeric but do not match the current Perl interpreter's version id, suppressing site_perl as a module hierarchy name etc.

Returns the full path of the first occurrence to the file. Package names (eg 'A::B') are automatically converted to directory names in the selected directory. (eg on unix 'A::B' is converted to 'A/B'). Additionally, '.pm', '.pl' and '.pod' are appended to the search automatically if required.

A subdirectory pod/ is also checked if it exists in any of the given search directories. This ensures that e.g. perlfunc is found.

It is assumed that if a module name is supplied, that that name matches the file name. Pods are not opened to check for the 'NAME' entry.

A check is made to make sure that the file that is found does contain some pod documentation.